For more than 20 years, Dr. Wright has been a leading scholar,
advocate, and activist in the environmental justice arena. She has
directed numerous grassroots community-initiated health surveys,
evaluated community buy-outs, and supervised community development
initiatives around contaminated sites and serves as a strong voice of
the grassroots environmental justice movement.

Dr. Wright is a
professor of sociology and the founding director of the Deep South
Center for Environmental Justice (DSCEJ). Since 1992, DSCEJ has fought
for the rights of residents of the Lower Mississippi River Industrial
Corridor, the area commonly referred to as Cancer Alley. Dr. Wright
served as chair of the Second National People of Color Leadership
Summit in 2002.

In early 2006, she initiated “A Safe Way Back Home,” a
pilot project with the United Steel Workers Union, in which
contaminated soil was removed from yards and common areas in the
Aberdeen Road neighborhood of New Orleans.

Jesse Clarke: There has been a lot of
publicity over the recent struggle focused on the destruction of public
housing units. What’s the general state of things in New Orleans today?
Who owned the city before Katrina, who owns it now?

Beverly Wright: The white elite is fighting to bring New Orleans
back, richer than it was and whiter than it was, with no concern for
anybody else. It’s clear to me that they don’t want people to come
back. I am not against tearing bad housing down if, in fact, the plan
is replacement housing. Poor people would love to live in a beautiful
community. The struggle is over the amount of replacement housing: We
are drawing a line in the sand for one-to-one replacement. We are right
at the height of this struggle.Clarke: How does that play out politically?

Wright: It affects your political strength. For example, they
moved six-to-eight thousand people out of public housing. What was
promised, was replacement housing. What we got, was a white city
council district. Now we have two white city council presidents because
the deal, when there was a Black majority, was to add a second
president for the whites. That was quickly forgotten when the
opportunity existed for them to take control, even though it’s not
representative.

Before the storm, the white population was quite
small. We had a majority Black city council. The Black population was
[around] 70 percent, if you add the undercount. The mayor claims to
have figures showing that we are almost back to 65 percent, but some
people don’t want those numbers known. Since the storm, hundreds of
Black people have been purged from the [voting] rolls, many of them
unable to get back home. In this context, they held an election for
city council where the one Black person that ran got 48 percent of the
vote. She needed 51 percent in order to [avoid] a run-off. Those
“missing voters” certainly made the difference. [At] the runoff, the
Black turnout was low. The result: a majority white city council.
There’s nothing about being fair in all of this. They took advantage of
the situation [and] now we have a majority white city council. That
could affect who owns what and where in a dramatic way and very
quickly.

I’ll give you an example of [something] I saw
happen that made me see what our plight could be. A Black woman who
owns a daycare center in a city that has an unbelievable shortage of
daycare went before the city council to have her [business] expanded.
She’s in an area that didn’t get a whole lot of water. The neighborhood
association—made up of all white people—came out against her expanding
this Black daycare center. I watched her get locked out with nobody to
speak for her, and the white city council president, saying: “I hope
you don’t give up. We’re going to go with the neighborhood association
and not allow you to expand this permit.” [At] a time when the city is
under water, he’s denying her the opportunity to expand service to
Black children needing daycare because the whites in the neighborhood
are against it!

It became so clear to me [then] what political representation means. And we don’t have anybody representing us.Clarke: So, is there a general resurfacing of racism in action—without the explicit words?

Wright: Absolutely! And sometimes there’s a resurgence of words.
I mean, I live in Dixie! One of our legislators said the flooding of
the housing project had done what the city had attempted to do for the
last 20 years, and that was to get rid of the poor. One of the city
council people talked about how we should never allow what happened
before. That is, have so many poor people concentrated in one place.

On the other hand, maybe it’s not really a
resurgence. [The racism] has always been here. It’s just that they have
been dealt a stronger hand. Their idea of getting rid of poverty is
shutting the poor out and making certain they don’t come to New
Orleans. Of course, the real way to deal with poverty is not to get rid
of the poor people but to get rid of poverty… [with] a decent school
system and living wage jobs. But that’s not how they see it. And they
said it openly.

They’ve also been talking about mixed-use housing:
with condos and all of this development that [will make] young,
upwardly mobile white people move to the city. What they’re attempting
to do is to change the political structure of this city by race. By
appealing to young white people to help us rebuild, they’re hoping to
get the city back to being white, which it hasn’t been in a very long
time.

Clarke: I understand that there was a sizeable amount of Black and poor home ownership in New Orleans.

Wright: Yes, [there are] a lot of poor homeowners. The lower
Ninth Ward was owned by Black people, and the renters oftentimes were
relatives [who] weren’t paying much rent.

Clarke: And what’s happening to these owners as the properties continue to sit vacant?

Wright: After the storm, [people] paid their houses off with the
insurance [but] they have no money to rebuild. A lot of the mortgage
companies forced the poor homeowners to pay off their mortgages, which
was illegal. So, these former homeowners [now] actually own the land
that’s just sitting there. They don’t have money to fix it but they
don’t feel the pressure to sell. That’s where Road Home {reconstruction
fund for homeowners] was supposed to kick in to help people, [and they]
are still waiting.

Clarke: They can still meet the tax bills, then?

Wright: Up to now, the taxes have not gone up extraordinarily,
because we still have—and it might change—a homestead exemption. For
example, the house that I live in now, my tax was $457 per year; [but]
with the homestead exemption, my tax bill is $25 per year. You pay no
taxes on the first $75,000 of your house’s [value]. In a Southern town
like this, where a majority of the houses cost less than $75,000, most
people pay zero. That’s why poor people could keep their homes. But
when they reassess the houses, [their value] will go up. It still
[would not be] like California and some other places, but it [may be]
enough for poor people to not be able to [afford] them.
This hasn’t happened yet, but it’s coming, and people are bracing
themselves for it. The city council has been talking about programs for
people under certain incomes so they wouldn’t lose their homes. That’s
going to be a big issue that we’re going to have to push for.

Clarke: When you look downtown you see new hotels, casinos, and entertainment centers; are the new owners getting a bonanza?

Wright: Oh, we’re getting some new owners. Donald Trump is
coming in. We [also] have the Uptown area—the Warehouse District
apartments and condos are extremely expensive. The Krauss Building on
Canal Street—I understand it’s already sold out and they just started
construction.
Some of this was going on before the storm and the storm just hastened
[things]. For instance, Uptown was built on a grid with super-houses on
the main street. The houses for workers are placed with slave quarters
on the Inner Circle, so you still have some relatively small houses off
the main streets… owned by Black people. [But] houses around them are
selling for a half million dollars, so these little wooden shotguns are
now being appraised for an unbelievable amount of money. That’s one of
the things that we’re real concerned about.
I think it’s a way to get rid of the poor people who own houses
Uptown—by increasing the value of the property all around them, [so]
they can’t afford the taxes.

Clarke: Are you trying to get new affordable housing built?

Wright: Well, that’s what’s going on now through the Office of
Recovery Management. Two huge contracts for building affordable housing
were given to two organizations—Providence, which has been around a
long time and is a part of the Council of Charities, and another
[newer] group. It still is nowhere near the number of housing units
we’ve lost or will lose, with the destruction of the projects, but
there is an attempt to make certain that we extract as much of the land
as we can for public housing. [When] they got rid of the St. Thomas
Housing Project, they included some low-income housing, but it’s
nowhere near [meeting the needs of] the 6,000 people who were displaced.

Clarke: How far has the rebuilding of the levees come? Who is benefiting?

Wright: I think that the majority of the energy and monies for
rebuilding have gone into the areas that have had the least amount of
damage. [That is] sections of the city where white people, rich people
live, [rather] than where poor and Black people live.
The Army Corps of Engineers has, in fact, [already] secured the
property of the wealthy white people. Their last report basically shows
that [wealthy, white] Lakeview and Old Metairie are the only sectors of
this city that have increased levee protection. They got
five-and-a-half feet more protection, so they probably won’t get any
water at all.
Where I live, we have gotten zero increased levee protection. The lower
Ninth [Ward] has gotten only two feet of increased protection. If we
get another hurricane like Katrina, we can expect approximately the
same amount of water and damage and loss of life [according to a] chart
from the Army Corps of Engineers. If that’s not the most racist thing
that I’ve ever seen in my life… people were so upset, they said it was
a mistake.
Clarke: So, who is doing this work?

Wright: Bottom line, outside contractors. For the most part, the
work is going to big firms that have long-term relationships with the
Army Corps. There are a small number of local contractors who have
gotten some money—to appease the masses. The local and minority
contractors are locked out.

Clarke: So they haven’t quite got the political will to actually
bulldoze, or rather re-asses and tax and expropriate the Black
homeowners?

Wright: Not yet. [But] I believe, it’s coming. They know they can buy this land for ten cents if we get another hurricane.
I think they’re getting a lot more resistance than what they expected.
The fact that there was so much Black home ownership is the thing
that’s hindering their process, and they’re trying to figure out how to
get that land from us. If they are successful, then they can move
forward with everything. But we’re holding on, you know, we’re holding
on.

In the Seventh Ward—the ward that I’m from—there
is a real vocal group [that is] adjudicating old properties and turning
them into low- to moderate-income housing in my old neighborhood. I
believe that that’s going to be our only hope—the tenacity of the
people themselves who are determined to keep their land like me and
many, many, others.

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